Today in New York, Porsche Design and LaCie have unveiled two sleek hard drives that utilize Porsche’s knack for style and LaCie’s expertise at creating reliable storage products. We were on hand to check out the unveiling at a Porsche Design store in New York City. The two drives–not so smoothly named the “Desktop P’9230” and “Mobile P’9220”–are fully framed in aluminum, have fast USB 3.0 compatibility, and can connect up to LaCie’s Wuala cloud storage as well.
Representatives from Porsche Design, which is known for its high end watches and gear, explained the design of the new luxury hard drives. The brushed metal and simple square look of the hardware comes from Porsche’s view that if you analyze the function of an object, that function will dictate its design. LaCie, for its part, tends to put style first in the design of its products as well. This is the second collaboration between the two companies. LaCie and Porsche released a hard drive back in 2003 as well.
LaCie and Porsche claim that the new drives are the fastest in the market. The Desktop model comes in 1TB to 2TB capacities and is the larger of the two, requiring its own dedicated power source and retailing. The smaller Mobile model runs off of a USB 3.0 connection and comes in 500GB and 1TB capacities, with a 750GB option being available in Porsche Design stores, located in New York City, Beverly Hills, Boston, and many other locations around the world. Porsche’s goal is to have 250 locations by 2015. Though many of the shoes, watches, cutlery, luggage, and sunglasses in Porsche Design stores are hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, LaCie’s hard drive will retail for a more affordable price. Models start at $104 and all include 10GB of free online storage in LaCie’s Wuala backup service.
LaCie and Porsche were kind enough to invite us out to the unveiling a few days ago. We’ve included quite a few pictures of the new hard drives and some of the interesting items in Porsche’s New York location. We’ve bee
